“Haxby Dutchman’s Diamond Jubilee”.
All words and photographs by Peter Stanhope.
I recently spent a fascinating afternoon with one of Haxby’s oldest and longest
residents. A man of a thousand stories who is truly, and quite literally, a cornerstone
of Haxby village ! This is his story.
It was St. Georges Day, 1952 that a very young man arrived in Haxby fresh off the
ferry at Hull from Holland with very little money and even less English, to start his
new life here. How little he can have had any perception back then how the next 60
years would change his life - and change his adopted Haxby and the people who live
here.
Jacob Verhoef was born in 1929 in a tiny community of De Kwakel which is just
south of Amsterdam and close to Aalsmeer, the horticultural capital of Holland. His
father was a farmer but young Jacob went into horticulture, working for growers in
the cut-flower industry which exports flowers all over Europe and the world from that
area.
But he was an ambitious and restless young man and he decided to take a College
degree in horticulture by attending night classes after work. After studying for five
years be obtained his degree in Utrecht and then he set about bettering himself. He
wanted to learn more useful languages and was thinking of moving to Germany, or
France, when he saw an advert in a Dutch trade newspaper. It was from a nursery in
England which needed an experienced and qualified young man to help expand the
business beyond the level that the two partners had taken it to. Jacob applied for the
job and, after an interview held in Amsterdam, was engaged to catch the ferry to Hull
and travel on to York, and the then to the very small village of Haxby.
“Hollandia Nurseries” was located in the middle of fields, up a cinder track, at the end
of The Avenue, off Sandy Lane and between Haxby and Wigginton. It had been set
up by a prior Dutchman emigrant to Haxby, Peter Van Zelst. They were growers of
cut flowers and vegetables to the trade, wholesale only at Haxby, though they did
have their own retail shop in Davygate and also did three market stalls in York,
Ripon and Knaresborough.
Jacob came to the job for the magnificent (then) sum of £10 per week - which was
twice what he was earning in Holland. He was only 23 yrs of age, unmarried and free
as a bird. In the first place he lived in ‘digs’ with a house in Hilbra Ave. and then in
Station Road. He was taken on as a senior member of the staff and had charge of
ten to twelve people in the greenhouses and growing fields, but with his limited
English he often had a tough time in the early years. Peter van Zelst was of little help
to him in translation as he just told him to ‘get on with it and learn the hard way’.
After four years of working for Hollandia, and with no rise above that starting wage of
£10 per week even though he had increased the business significantly, Jacob
started to become restless and was ready to move on.
Meanwhile, he had met a young lady at a ‘bop’ at the Folk Hall in New Earswick and
they were now ‘going out’ together. When he told her that Lady Halifax, a client of
the nursery, had offered him a job at Garrowby Hall which would come with an
increase in wage plus a free cottage on the estate, it seemed like a very attractive
offer. But the young lady was wise and she said that Jacob would forever be at Lady
Halifax’s beck and call and the cottage would only ever be theirs whilst he had the
job. If he lost the job they would lose their home ! So he had better look for another
opportunity elsewhere.
So Jacob decided to place an advert in the British horticultural trade press (just like
the one which had brought him from Holland to England) looking for a firm which
would value his experience and qualifications and would offer him a partnership and
better prospects. The response was amazing and he got over 50 letters delivered by
the village postman. But one reply was by telegram from a family-owned nursery in
Carlisle, Cumbria. They wanted to take on a senior manager to work with the son of
the family to continue the expansion of the business while the parents retired and
returned to London and Jacob would become a partner in the business with no
capital investment.
Jacob was very impressed by the opportunity and they were very impressed by him.
So he was offered the job, there and then. Jacob agreed to take it and he returned to
Haxby very excited. However, the girl friend wasn’t quite so excited and pointed out
that the business would always belong to the family, blood being thicker than water,
and he could find himself working for someone else for the rest of his life.
By this time he had told Hollandia Nurseries that he was leaving them and they were
so concerned (as he had built their business for them anew) that they didn’t want to
see him leave - but they could see that he was ambitious to have his own business.
Peter van Zelst therefore offered Jacob to take over the whole of the cut flower
nursery as his business - if Jacob would rent the greenhouses from Peter !
The year was 1956, just four years since Jacob Verhoef had arrived in Haxby, and
now he was working for himself for the very first time ! He first registered the name
“Dutch Nurseries” in that year and he was very surprised that nobody else had ever
registered it in Britain before ! Jacob was still single and still lodging around various
Haxby homes. But now he was his own man - to succeed, or fail, according to his
own enterprise.
Dutch Nurseries was a wholesale business, growing cut flowers for the trade
markets but Jacob also took over the market stalls as well. But the Haxby nursery
was not, and had always refused, retail customers. It was too much trouble to handle
individual customers!
One day, however, an officer came in from the Army officers quarters at Strensall
and he wanted to buy a lot of plants for his garden. He placed an order for £30 in
one go - which was three weeks or more wages for the people working in the
nursery. This officer told Jacob that he really should go retail - but the nursery was
still, at that time, hidden away up a narrow lane off Sandy Lane and in the middle of
the fields. “You ought to put up some ‘Dutch Nurseries’ signs on the front road!” said.
Jacob took this advice to heart.
At that time the area fronting onto the main road between Haxby & Wigginton, at the
corner of Moor Lane, was just allotments. It had been so since after the First World
War when that area had become a sand-mine for filling sand bags and the level had
sunk below the surrounding roads. But Jacob was wanting to put some notices out
there so he set out to find who the owner of the land was.
Mr. Harold Fox was a senior manager at the Midland Bank in Parliament Street and
he lived on York Road, almost opposite where the Ethel Ward Playing Fields now
are. Jacob went to see him and asked if he could put some signs up along the
roadside. Mr. Fox was very sympathetic and would have given his agreement except he was just about to sell the land. He had had so much trouble with the
allotment tenants and their problems in recent years that he wanted out ! Jacob was
firstly disappointed but then asked if Mr. Fox had a buyer ? Mr. Fox said, no he
hadn’t put it onto the market yet. Jacob saw an amazing oppportunity here. But how
much was he wanting for it ?
Jacob was still only in his 20’s. He had been in England only five years but had
managed to save up £500 in his bank account, a substantial amount in 1957. But
how much did Mr. Fox want for his land? He said that he also owned some low-lying
land on the other side of Moor Lane which had also been a sand mine, and the two
parcels would be sold together. From Moor Lane end to the cottages next to the
Village Pond and back to Sandy Lane, then over the road from almost the corner of
Moor Lane and right back to where Windsor Drive now is.
Mr. Fox had been offered £300 for just one house plot on the Moor Lane side - so
what did that value the whole lot as?
He must have taken pity on the young Dutchman in his early business struggles
because he agreed to accept Jacob’s offer of £550 for the two parcels of land, either
side of the Moor Lane junction. And so that nobody could ever say that he took
advantage of young Jacob, Mr. Fox offered to sell it to him for just £540 with a one
year money-back guarantee ! Jacob then had to go to the bank to persuade his
Lloyds Bank Manager to cover the extra £40 which he simply did not have anywhere
! The Manager said ‘go ahead and I’ll look after you”. That Bank Manager did not
know for how many years that would be !
So Jacob Verhoef, the young Dutchman still in his 20’s was now the very proud
owner of his own piece of England, just four years after arriving in Haxby with
nothing ! But although it was low-lying land, and wet - it was just the sort of challenge
that a man from Holland was ideally suited to ! Jacob set-to and drained the land in
the Dutch fashion with a herring-bone drainage system and fed the water into the
Kyle Drainage Board beck on the Wigginton side of Moor Lane. The drainage cost
him £1,800 to complete But meanwhile he also had to clear all the stuff which had
been there - all the hedges, the sheds and the growing paraphenalia left behind by
the allotments tenants.
Next he had to start to install his greenhouses, some of which he acquired
secondhand, and to heat them with an oil-fired heating system installed first by
Shouksmiths of York and then by Scurr Heating when Jack Scurr started his own
business based on this, his first installation.
Quite soon Jacob was ready to start planting out his first cuttings of pink Carnations
for the cut flower trade. He knew that, back in Holland, Britain had been the biggest
export market for pink Carnations from Aalsmeer. But as there were no growers in
Northern England - here was a unique business opportunity for Jacob !
Over the coming years Dutch Nurseries became, in phases, a large and very
successful grower of carnations. As the years passed by Jacob was asked to grow
carnations of other colours and so he branched out from pink, into yellow, red etc.
Each colour required an expansion of the greenhouses and another visit to the same
Bank Manager for Jacob to ‘beg’ once again for further financial assistance.
Eventually Jacob had 2 1/2 acres ‘under glass’ on the Haxby side of Moor Lane and
in front of Sandy Lane.
Meanwhile, Jacob was still going out with the young lady he had first met at a ‘bop’
at the Folk Hall, New Earswick. In 1958, then aged 29yrs., Jacob Verhoef married
Audrey Blakemore and they first set up their home in the luxury of a caravan on the
the land which he was now developing. They lived in this caravan on site for the first
four years of their married life. Later they would build their own family home at the
junction of Moor Lane and The Village which they named “Greendykes” (with
memories of Holland), where they would live together for over 50 years. Here they
brought up their family of three children. Jacob still lives there today.
By now, in the late 1950’s, the Dutch Nurseries business was growing carnations for
the trade cut flower markets in Leeds, Bradford and Gateshead. The business
employed from 10 to 20 staff, mostly Haxby village people, in the growing, cutting,
packing and despatch areas. Jacob is always keen to say “the best thing about
business is the staff - the worst thing about being in business is the Banks !” Jacob
also still did the markets in York, Knaresborough and Ripon which he had inherited
with the business from Peter van Zelst of Hollandia. These market stalls were held
year-round, no matter what the weather, and Jacob and his fellow Dutchman Arri
Pouw, who worked with and for Jacob for 38 years, were often to be seen tending
the stalls in their Dutch clogs. For the markets they also grew 2 acres of Dahlias on
open ground behind Sandy Lane (now Oaken Grove).
The 60’s and 70’s were very good years for the Dutch Nurseries business but, by the
time the 1980’s came around things began to change. More nurseries were around
in the Haxby area with Browns in Wigginton, Bells in Haxby and Lears (now Pat’s)
opposite Haxby pond. The greenhouses bought and installed in the 1950’s were now
thirty years old (or older if they were bought secondhand) and in need of heavy
maintenance. The land on which Jacob had been growing was also becoming ‘tired’
and the carnation stocks were producing lower yields and subject to diseases.What
to do next ?
Jacob decided to get out of nurseries and in the first instance tried his hand as a
Garden Centre. Then he started to buy in Army surplus stocks at auctions and he
created his “Bargain Centre” in the greenhouses. He even bought some games
machines, coin slot rides and other entertainments to create a kind of ‘youth club
under glass’. But none of them really worked well. He even had the idea of building a
pub on the land but was turned down - and that was some years before “The
Cottage” was created out of a private residence right across the road from where
Jacob’s idea had been rejected !
Then a friend asked Jacob if he had any idea what the value of his land was over
thirty years since he had first bought it all ? He suggested that Jacob should speak
with some builders and developers.
The first section which Jacob decided to sell was the area towards the terrace
cottages next to Haxby Pond. He decided to build apartments and townhouses for
sale but wanted the developer to build into the scheme two shops - for him. One
would be the Dutch Nurseries Florists. The other one was a very bright, and forward
looking idea of Jacob’s. He wanted to open a Chemist shop there - right across the
street from the Medical Centre. He could see the potential ! In the end he built both,
kept the Florists but sold the Chemist shop to the other chemist in Haxby after he
had raised an objection to another chemists shop opening so close to him ! That
shop is now a branch of Boots. So Wyre Mews was built first, in 1990.
Then a firm approached him about land to build a retirement apartments complex.
Jacob released some more of his land and Wyre Court was built. Soon after he was
made an approach from a firm in Strensall wanting to build a care home and so the
tennis court and croquet lawn which Jacob had initially built beside and behind his
family home were next to go in favour of the Birchlands Nursing Home. Jacob took
the oppportunity to build an extension to his house and a large conservatory to the
side at this time.
At a point in time the Corporation wanted to realign the junction of Moor Lane and
The Village, Wigginton and so this would leave the old road, which passed by
Jacobs driveway entrance, separated from the new road by a wide verge. The
Corporation firstly wanted £600 from Jacob to retain the old road, but then he was
‘given’ it as his private entry to ‘Greendykes’. They also gave him the ‘freedom but
not the right’ to cultivate the wide verge which surrounds the corner taking in the
“Haxby” sign and it this which is now such a wonderful entry to our village, admired
by all who pass it by.
Jacob and Audrey spent over 50 years together at their Dutch Nurseries and
subsequent business ventures. They had three children, all of whom are now grown
up, a son lives in Scarborough and another son in London. Their daughter Frances
carries on the family tradition being a Florist in London too ! They have 6
grandchildren and “Greendykes” was a wonderful family home over all those years.
Tragically, however, Audrey passed away in 2008 at the age of 73 years, just a few
months after enjoying 50 years of marraige with Jacob and celebrating their Golden
Wedding together. They had lived in only the one house (and one caravan) for all of
that time !
So 2012 is the 60th anniversary of Jacob Verhoef arriving in Haxby as a very young,
but very enterprising, man. He could have had no idea back then where his life
would take him - and he could have no idea how much his life would change the
nature of his adopted village.
When he arrived the population of Haxby was a small village of only 1,200 people.
Now it is a Town of nearing 10,000 residents, many hundreds of whom live in
houses, homes, apartments or are in-care on the land which Jacob invested all his
money in, and worked so hard over the years to afford.
Now 83 years, Jacob Verhoef spends much of his time tending his verge garden
which is his daily delight and gives such a “Welcome to Haxby” for all who arrive in
our village from the Wigginton end. It is a glorious riot of colour all year around and
he is especially proud of his new border, his Olympic rings picked out in the grass
and “Haxby” set out in bedding plants.
He is still very active and enjoys holidays including cruises to the Caribbean, and the
odd day out at the races.
He still doesn’t speak the Queen’s English but he has a charming Dutch accent still
remaining - even after 60 years !
Haxby should be very proud of Jacob Verhoef - just as he is proud of Haxby as his
home !